Blog
Notes, write-ups, and things worth keeping.
The Art of Golden Hour Photography
Why the hour after sunrise and before sunset makes every photo better — the physics of low-angle light, exposure strategy, composition, and the post-processing that keeps the warmth honest.
DNS, Explained: From Resolvers to Encrypted Queries
The recursive chain, caching and TTLs, DNSSEC, and the privacy problem that DoH and DoT were built to solve — a complete walkthrough of the internet's most invisible critical system.
Building a Tiny Static Site Generator in 200 Lines of Python
Front matter, Markdown, layouts, and a build graph — a complete static site generator in 200 lines, and everything you learn about the real ones by writing your own.
Why Small Language Models Are Quietly Winning
The frontier models get the headlines; the 1–8B models get the deployments. Distillation, quantization, routing, and the economics that make small models the default for real products.
The Best Budget Audio Gear I Tested in 2026
IEMs under $50, a $99 headphone that embarrasses $300 ones, DAC dongles, and the diminishing-returns curve — a year of budget audio testing, with the picks that survived.
The Science of Pour-Over Coffee
Extraction chemistry, grind size, water hardness, the bloom, and why the 4:6 method works — the variables behind a great cup, ranked by how much they actually matter.
My Homelab Monitoring Stack: Observability on a Budget
Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager on one old mini-PC — the complete monitoring stack I run for 14 services, with the dashboards, alerts, and lessons learned.